The lobbyist

Before you testify, Mr. Clemens, will you please autograph this ball for my nephew Billy?

So it went on one of the more unusual days in Congress and, for that matter, Major League Baseball. While McNamee quickly left the building after his deposition and did not attend his lawyers’ news conference, Clemens was introduced at his by a representative — Ted Poe, a Republican from Clemens’s home state, Texas — and said he was upbeat about his tenuous situation.

“It was a great day,” Clemens said. “I got a lot of walking in. I learned a lot about the bowels of the buildings I was in and out of. It was great. I had a lot of great meetings and I look forward to Wednesday next week. See y’all then.”

[...]

In at least several instances, the meet and greet seemed to work.

“Just sort of a gosh-darn kind of guy,” Brian P. Bilbray, Republican of California, said in a telephone interview after he and three other members of the committee took part in a meeting with Clemens that lasted about 30 minutes. “Just the kind of guy you’d probably want to have as a next-door neighbor, I guess, if he didn’t hit a baseball through your window.”

Clemens “just wants to protect his reputation,” Bilbray added, saying that Clemens had told him he would not cast stones at anybody else.

And can someone tell the lawyers on both sides to shut up?